Publisher DTP Crew

This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. This video features Kina Grannis, a pretty young woman who became popular overnight on YouTube for producing this video featuring her and her two sisters, Misa and Emi, singing a song, called "Gotta Digg", about the wacko passion that some people feel about participating in Digg.com. Her song is relevant to the DTP because she is singing about a news aggregator that author Dan Gillmor predicted would be created with Free Open Source Software. His prediction appeared in 2004 in his book, "We the Media", before either Digg.com or YouTube existed. Kina's lyrics can be downloaded here.

For those who don't know, Digg.com is very popular news and entertainment aggregation site powered by the GNU Linux operating system that allows readers of on-line magazines and viewers of on-line video to determine what becomes news. Individual users of the Digg site vote (digg) for the news stories and videos that they would like to see appear on the front page of Digg. Millions of viewers come to Digg everyday to see what their fellow "diggers" have chosen as the day's top stories and videos. Submitting stories to Digg can become quite fun and even addictive for diggers, because any digger can potentially submit a story that will be read by as many people as those who read a major daily newspaper such as the San Francisco Chronicle.

We have chosen to add this video to our video library, with Kina's permission, because this song has received 329,067 views as of 28 January, 2008, which was only about one month after its posting on 23 December 2007. This video is exemplary of Dan Gillmor's prediction that Free Open Source Software would allow the former "audience" to become creators and editors of news. Both Digg.com and YouTube.com run on the Free Open Source Software operating system called "GNU Linux", more widely known as "Linux" for short, and Kevin Rose, the guy who created Digg, has also released the Digg software as Free Open Source Software.

But the most important reason that we posted this song is that it show how Free Open Source Software can allow almost anyone to influence global culture. The guys who created YouTube and Digg were all in their early 20s when they created their respective websites, and Kevin Rose has gone on record as saying that he created Digg with an investment of only $1,000.00 USD. Likewise, with nothing more than her Apple notebook computer, Kina was able to record a song and upload it to YouTube and gain widespread notoriety for her good looks and musical wit. (Apple notebooks also run on a Free Open Source Software operating system called "FreeBSD").

Before the advent of Free Open Source Software, Kina would have had to spend thousands of dollars to hire an agent and win a record contract to have her song heard by hundreds of thousands of people. Lots of talented people languished in obscurity because they never had that much money. But now, with Free Open Source Software, Kina was able to become a celebrity overnight, all for a song.

Kina's original YouTube video can be found here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=XLLRsn_nr6s

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at digitaltippingpoint.com.

Or, if you would like to contribute by directly transcribing this particular video segment, you can do so by going here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Tape_999

and typing the audio as you hear it into the wiki. Please be sure to add the transcription for this segment under: Segment 001, Kina Grannis
You can find other ways to contribute by going to our wiki front page here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Thanks for viewing our video!

Contact Information Christian Einfeldt, einfeldt at g mail dot com